CMH Pub 70–114–1 - U.S. Army Center Of Military History

Cover: Patrol Extraction, Grenada, November 1983, by Marbury Brown All photos are from Department of Defense files.

CMH Pub 70?114?1

Introduction

At the end of the Vietnam War and the end of selective service, the United States Army was forced to rebuild itself into an all-volunteer force. The Army in the late 1970s and early 1980s was untested in combat and faced a crisis in confidence, a reduction in size, and the need to reorganize and restructure. Army leaders, doctrine, and the political climate of the time compelled the Army to focus on its primary potential military mission: the defense of western Europe. Equipment and manpower were geared toward this mission.

In October 1983, the U.S. Army was unexpectedly thrown into a "no-notice" joint force contingency operation on the little island of Grenada. Confronted with a deteriorating political situation on Grenada after the deposing and execution of the leader of the government by its own military, the perceived need to deal firmly with Soviet and Cuban influence in the Caribbean, and the potential for several hundred U.S. citizens becoming hostages, the Ronald W. Reagan administration launched an invasion of the island with only a few days for the military to plan operations. While the military's capabilities were never in doubt, the unexpectedly strong Cuban and Grenadian resistance in the first two days of the operation and the host of U.S. military errors in planning, intelligence, communications, and logistics highlighted the dangers of even small contingency operations. As the first joint operation attempted since the end of the Vietnam War, the invasion of Grenada also underscored the problems the U.S. Army faced in trying to work in a joint environment with its Air Force, Navy, and Marine counterparts.

This pamphlet was prepared by Richard W. Stewart, the Center's Chief Historian, and is an edited extract of Senior Historian Edgar F. Raines' forthcoming account of U.S. Army operations on Grenada entitled The Rucksack War: U.S. Army Operational Logistics in Grenada, October?November 1983. We hope that you enjoy and profit from this synopsis of the short, yet significant, contingency operation conducted by the U.S. Army as part of the joint team in the early days of the allvolunteer force.

JEFFREY J. CLARKE Chief of Military History

Operation Urgent Fury

The Invasion of Grenada, October 1983

The U.S. Army spent much of the decade after its retreat from Vietnam rebuilding itself into a supremely capable, all-volunteer force. With the application of new doctrine, equipment, and, especially, dynamic leadership at all levels, the Army slowly recovered from that traumatic time. Focused primarily on preparations to counter the Soviet and Warsaw Pact threat to central Europe, the U.S. Army trained hard in conventional operations as enshrined in its primary doctrinal manual, Field Manual 100?5, Operations (1976). Within ten years of the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the Army had rebuilt itself but had only begun to integrate into a joint team capable of fighting in a synchronized multiservice operation. World events, however, have a way of forcing a nation to go to war or, at least, to engage in operations "with the Army it has, and not the Army it wants," to quote a more contemporary statement of how occurrences have a way of surprising policy makers. In the case of Grenada, an obscure island in the Caribbean, the circumstances resulting from an internal power struggle between Communist leaders spilled over into a short, but intense, contingency operation for the U.S. Army.

Strategic Setting

The island of Grenada is the smallest and most southerly of the Windward Islands in the Caribbean Sea (Map 1). It is a poor island and had a population of some 91,000 in 1983. It is only 100 miles from Venezuela but almost 1,500 miles southeast of Key West, Florida. The main island of Grenada has an area of about 200 square miles, with a few smaller islands bringing the total to some 220 square miles. The next closest island to Grenada in the Windward chain is St. Vincent to the north. The capital of Grenada, St. George's, had a population of about 7,500 inhabitants. Grenada's main cash crops were mace, nutmeg, and bananas, but one of the island's main sources of revenue was the St. George's University School of Medicine. The school was founded in 1976 and had two main campuses at True Blue near Point Salines and Grand Anse just south of St. George's. The medical school had about seven hundred American students attending in 1983 and by itself generated between 10 and 15 percent of the entire gross national product of Grenada.

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